Media Viewer aims to improve the viewing experience for readers and casual editors on Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites.

This new multimedia browser displays images in larger size, with useful information about their content, authors and related metadata. It also offers a number of features to enlarge, share, download or embed media files, as described below.

To open an image in Media Viewer, click on its thumbnail on any article, gallery or category page. This will display a larger image in Media Viewer, right over the page where you clicked. We call this the 'lightbox view'.

The image is shown in large size against a black background, as an overlay that fills up the entire browser page where you clicked on the thumbnail. This makes the image stand out more and removes some of the visual clutter typically found on a text-heavy page.

The 'full-screen view' shows the large image across the entire screen (not just the browser window), with minimal information and buttons available on hover. This view lets you focus exclusively on the image, with no other distractions. In this mode, you only see the controls, the file name and the author/source/license if you hover over the image.

The Disable/Enable, Download and Share/Embed buttons open up small panels over the image. The Enlarge and 'More details' functions go to a separate page.

More meta-data can be added to this panel, as needed (e.g.: file name).

These features are available every time you click on a thumbnail to open Media Viewer, as long as the tool is enabled. Media Viewer is now enabled by default on all Wikimedia sites, but can be disabled by any user, as described here. From a file description page, click on "Open in Media Viewer" below the image to view it with this tool.

You can also post your report on this discussion page, with a screenshot and information on your browser and operating system :).

Before reporting a bug, check first that this issue is not already on this list of known bugs. In case it’s already been fixed, you may also want to test it on this test page on MediaWiki.org -- where new features are released a week before the rest of the wikis.

Work in progress can usually be tested on this beta site, where new features are rolled out before going to production.

Note: Media Viewer only supports the most widely used image file formats on Wikimedia sites (e.g.: JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, SVG). In future releases, we plan to add support for more file formats, such as PDF, audio and video files.

Media Viewer was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team from July 2013 to November 2014. It was designed in collaboration with community members, in a series of discussions held over video conferences, IRC, and face-to-face meetings. This tool was then developed and tested as a Beta Feature through April 2014, when it was gradually released worldwide, over a three-month period.

Please check the links above for more information about these different sources of user feedback.

Over 18,199 feedback responses about Media Viewer were collected as part of a wide online survey hosted in multiple languages, from April to July 2014. A majority of global respondents found the tool "useful for viewing images and learning about them" (56% "useful", 35% "not useful", 9% "not sure"), based on total unweighted survey results, as shown on this spreadsheet.
When weighted to match global Wikipedia readership for each language, fewer respondents found the tool "useful" than "not useful" (39% "useful", 50% "not useful", and 10% "not sure").
Cumulative "useful" approval ratings by language: English 36%, French 70%, Spanish 78%, Dutch 59%, Portuguese 81%, German 30%, Hungarian 63%, Catalan 71%.
Readers tended to view the tool more favorably than advanced users.
These approval ratings increased over time in all languages, suggesting that users found Media Viewer more useful for viewing images over time, as new improvements were developed based on feedback.
Note that this was an optional survey, so approval rates should not be cited as a conclusive metric, as they are subject to self-selection bias (just like RfCs cited below).

Five requests for comments (RfCs) about Media Viewer were initiated by community members in the summer of 2014: two on the English Wikipedia, two on the German Wikipedia, and one on Wikimedia Commons. These RfCs typically involved up to a couple hundred contributors at a time, with low participation from readers, the target users for this product. Feedback from these RfCs shows that a majority of participants (including every single "reader" and "casual editor") believed that the "Media Viewer" should be disabled by default for all users, logged-in or not, and either left as an opt-in feature or scrapped altogether. Aside from any technical shortcomings, discontent was also shown with the manner in which the project was conducted and the lack of transparency shown by the team responsible.

Feature development has now ended for this version of Media Viewer. In future versions, the multimedia team will consider adding more features requested by our community, such as a better zoom tool, a Mobile Media Viewer and/or support for more file formats (e.g. slides, video, audio, as shown in these slides).